The $5 fix you need
NVMe SSDs are quickly becoming one of the most expensive components in a typical gaming PC. Yet despite their importance, many people ignore a crucial factor in performance and longevity: cooling.
Running bare NVMe without a heatsink risks losing performance and even causing permanent damage to your expensive drive. Fortunately, there is a solution, and it’s cheaper and easier than you think.
Overheating Slowly Kills Your NVMe (And You May Not Even Notice)
Modern M.2 NVMe are designed to run relatively hot, by design. Most can withstand operating temperatures up to 70°C before starting to slow transfer rates to lower temperatures.
In fact, it’s even believed that excessive cooling can actually reduce performance because flash memory becomes more “malleable”, but the controller performs best when it’s as cool as possible. So you don’t really have to worry about your NVMe overcooling, but you definitely need to worry about overheating.
However, it should be noted that not all NVMe get hot enough to exceed their safe operating temperatures.
Generally, the faster an NVMe is, the hotter it will run. While many PCIe Gen 3 NVMe are designed to work just fine without a heatsink, PCIe Gen 4 and especially Gen 5 NVMe generate enough heat that this can become a problem.
For example, JayzTwoCents performed a 15-minute stress test on the Samsung 990 Pro 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe, and the drive quickly reached and supported temperatures between 85°C and 90°C, which is certainly hot enough to damage the NVMe if it were constantly operating at those temperatures.
However, these temperatures don’t occur randomly, as your NVMe only uses a fraction of its speed during light workloads. But if you play games with a lot of large files or frequently transfer large files to and from your NVMe, you’ll hit these dangerous temperatures more often than the drive is designed to handle.
Additionally, because the NVMe sits right between the GPU and the CPU, the surrounding air can get rather hot when your PC is under load.
If you think your NVMe is overheating, you may have already noticed that it is struggling to achieve the loading times and file transfer speeds that you got when the drive was new.
If you have already ruled out possible software issues, there is a good chance that your drive will overheat and even fail.
However, more often than not, you won’t notice the warning signs of overheating until it’s too late. An NVMe PCIe Gen 4 can achieve sequential read speeds of 5,000 MB/s to 7,000 MB/s, so even if it runs at 50% of that speed, most everyday tasks won’t reveal the slowdown. Browsing, document editing, and even most gaming loads aren’t enough to saturate a 5,000MB/s drive.
In other words, unless you move hundreds of gigabytes regularly, you’ll rarely feel the impact of overheating, even if it slowly cooks your expensive NVMe.
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How to check if your NVMe is getting too hot
Your NVMe has built-in temperature sensors, so it’s surprisingly easy to check its operating temperature. The simplest tool for this is CrystalDiskInfo, which also reports the health status of your SSD.
Another similar tool is HWiNFO, which can monitor both temperature and general disk health.
Once you have downloaded CrystalDiskInfo, you can check the temperature of your NVMe. The main temperature displayed is the controller temperature. If you hover over it, you can see readings from other sensors, usually NAND memory and PCB temperatures. The temperature of the controller is the most important, so this is the one to watch.
You can press F5 to refresh the app to get a real-time reading or, alternatively, set up an automatic refresh period by going to Function > Auto-refresh > selecting your preferred refresh time.
However, if you really want to know the typical operating temperatures of your NVMe, you’ll need to put it under charge. Open the chart in CrystalDiskInfo by going to Function > Chart.
The chart will help you track your NVMe temperatures. Next, put the NVMe under load by playing a demanding game or transferring a large file from the NVMe to another drive. If you want to be extreme, you can run a stress testing tool like CrystalDiskMark. Just keep in mind that stress testing pushes the SSD to its absolute limits and can cause some overheating, even with a heatsink.
If you notice that your NVMe regularly exceeds its maximum operating temperature (usually around or slightly above 70°C) during your PC’s typical workloads, it is very likely that it is overheating and could benefit from a heatsink.
Protect your drive with a cheap heatsink
You’ll probably scoff at the idea of having to buy yet another additional part for your PC. The good news is that an NVMe heatsink doesn’t need to be a special or overly sophisticated component to do its job.
If your motherboard includes an M.2 heatsink, which even many budget and mid-range boards do, you can absolutely use it. My ASRock B650M PG Riptide came with one, and it’s what I’ve been using on my NVMe since the day I built the PC.
If you are already using the heatsink that came with your motherboard, have you made sure to remove the protective film from the thermal pads underneath? If not, now is a good time to check.
If your motherboard didn’t come with a heatsink, or you have multiple NVMe but only one heatsink included, good aftermarket options are very cheap. For example, the ID-COOLING ZERO-M05 is often considered one of the best discrete NVMe heatsinks, and you can regularly find it for around $5 on sites like AliExpress.
Another option you can get on Amazon is the ARCTIC M2 Pro, a superb heatsink from a very reputable brand.
Of course, you don’t have to stick to discrete heatsinks if your goal is to squeeze the full performance out of your NVMe. In this case, something beefier like the ID-COOLING ZERO-M15 or even an NVMe heatsink with fan, like the Thermalright HR10 2280 PRO, makes more sense.
Frankly, these heavy-duty heatsinks are overkill for most people, but if you want the best speeds and longevity from a PCIe Gen 5 drive, this is the way to go.
Either way, having some sort of heatsink on your NVMe is easily one of the best investments you can make for your system.
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